Having an article in the next ‘Folklife Traditions Journal‘ (out in March) and sporadically working on a(nother) folk-ish album which may have to be mostly unaccompanied, I’m starting to worry that people will start accusing me of being a folkie again. Though I picked up a guitar just now and my left hand appeared to be almost back to normal, so there may yet be quite a lot of guitar after all.
Now I’ve looked more closely, I see that Rosie Upton and I both wrote about songs sung by our grandmothers. Editor Sam Simmons gets at least two bonus points for tagging the articles The Granny Awards.
[Disclaimer: you’ll probably see ads under and possibly incorporated into articles on this blog. I don’t choose them and I don’t approve them: that’s the price I pay for not being able to afford to pay for all my blogs…]
I’m amused to see that Amazon has excised the word ‘Facebook’ from the ordering details of the latest book. I’m not sure whether that’s because of corporate mistrust of competitors, nervousness because it isn’t complimentary about Meta, or just that I’ve breached some unwritten rule of titling. But at least the title survives on the book cover.
Available as Kindle eBook and as paperback.
“Sadly, while it would be entertaining (for me, but maybe less for you) to write a more academic book tracing the historical aspects and trends in Facebookland, that will have to wait. Here, my primary aim is to provide an overview of Facebook-related issues that will be of more use to the everyday Facebook user than to academics and security mavens. However, the links to articles in the Appendix, covering issues such as the Cambridge Analytica shambles, may be useful to researchers wanting to go deeper into those issues that I haven’t covered in an in-depth article here. (Or even that I have covered, but not in depth!)”
When I was a hopeful young singer-songwriter living in the South East in the 1970s, I spent a lot of time in folk clubs in Berkshire, Hampshire and Surrey. (Especially the one I helped to run for a while, at South Hill Park in Bracknell. It seems there still is a Bracknell Folk club, though it’s now at Bagshot, apparently.)
There were some fine acts who often visited the Home Counties in those days – there still are, of course, but I’m not there to see them! – some of them sadly gone (Bill Caddick, Vin Garbutt), some still around but no longer touring.
One singer whose charm and grace I remember with much affection is Miriam Backhouse (now Miriam Erasmus), a frequent visitor to the area with a wide repertoire ranging from Baron of Brackley and The Recruited Collier to Jeremy Taylor’s Nasty Spider and a spine-tingling version of Steve Goodman’s Ballad of Penny Evans. Since she moved to South Africa, we’ve seen less of her in the UK, but she still visits quite regularly, and her next tour is scheduled for June to October 2024, with another promised for 2025. I’m crossing my fingers in the hope that someone will book her for a venue near enough for me to get to, this time, as I haven’t seen her in person since those days in Bracknell!
In the 1970s, I put a tune to Housman’s poem The Carpenter’s Son. Not that I did much with it at the time. Much more recently, revisiting my Housman settings (probably as a result of having moved to Ludlow), I recorded a version that included some fairly ambitious (for me) guitar, then went further and recorded an instrumental version called Carpentry with additional instruments overdubbed. (Bouzouki and mountain dulcimer.)
This remix combines a more recent acoustic guitar and vocal version with part of the instrumental version appended. Whether it’s a good idea remains to be decided. 🙂
Back in the 60s, when I was first captivated by folk music, it was almost obligatory for folk club performers to introduce a song as “a song I learned from my grandmother”, though it was widely suspected, as someone (Steve Benbow, perhaps?) said at that time*, that “most of those grandmothers live in the library at Cecil Sharp House.”
As it happens, my grandmother really had been something of a musician in her youth: I think her weapon of choice was the accordion or a related free-reed aerophone**, but she hadn’t owned or played one in many years when I knew her. Still, we did, for a while, play harmonica duets together, and she was certainly no beginner on that instrument. I don’t remember what we actually played, but she did teach me a couple of songs, though I’m not able to reveal a shining rediscovered example of a major ballad, sadly.
Please excuse the rather random music notation. I’m not very music-literate at the best of times, and I haven’t quite got to grips with the software I’m using yet.
Ain’t No Bugs On Me
An abbreviated version of this part of the article was published in the issue of Folk InCornwall for January-March 2024.
One was a song that was certainly known in the early-ish 20th Century in the South of the US under the names “It ain’t gonna rain no more” or “There ain’t no bugs on me”, not least from a version rewritten by Fiddlin’ John Carson. As it’s long been popular among lovers of Americana, I’ve heard and seen so many verses to it, that I’ve mostly forgotten now which verses Gran knew, but I’m pretty sure they didn’t include Carson’s famous verse about Ku Klux Klan, so I’ve no idea now how she came across them. However, a version by Wendell Holmes, which recycles a number of floating verses but for which he claimed authorship, was a hit in the 1920s in the UK (where it became a popular football song) as well as the US, so it’s not unlikely that she heard it around that time. That version is now out of copyright, but in any case, the song had, according to Carl Sandburg’s The American Songbag, been around in various versions since the 1870s if not earlier.
The short dance song version published by Sandburg seems to come (like many of the songs in the Songbag) from the collection of Nebraska-born poet and collector of songs Edwin Ford Piper (1871-1939), who believed it had found its way West from Kentucky and thereabouts. It has a less flippant lyric than the versions now commonly heard, but uses (more or less) the same tune.
It ain’t gonna rain, it ain’t gonna snow,
It ain’t gonna rain no mo’;
Come on ev’rybody now,
Ain’t gonna rain no mo’.
Oh, what did the blackbird say to the crow?
It ain’t gonna rain no mo’,
Ain’t gonna hail, ain’t gonna snow,
Ain’t gonna rain no mo
Bake them biscuits good and brown,
It ain’t gonna rain no mo’.
Swing yo’ ladies round and round,
Ain’t gonna rain no mo’
My grandmother did remember this chorus or something very similar (it’s very common!):
It ain’t gonna rain no more, no more
It ain’t gonna rain no more
So how the hell can the old folks tell
It ain’t gonna rain no more
She also had this (also common) alternative chorus:
It ain’t gonna rain no more, no more
It ain’t gonna rain no more
So how the heck can a man wash his neck
If it ain’t gonna rain no more?
That Ku Klux Klan verse from Fiddlin’ John Carson goes:
The night was dark and dreary
And the air was full of sleet
The old man joined the Ku Klux Klan
And ma, she lost her sheet.
That verse probably took some courage to sing in those days, and it may not be much better now. It parodies a verse from the Wendell Holmes version:
The night was dark and dreary
And the air was full of sleet,
When the old man stood out in the storm
And his shoes were full of feet!
Carson’s version also took a swing at the evolution controversy with this verse, which I haven’t seen elsewhere:
Monkeys swing by the end of their tails
And jump from tree to tree
There may be monkey in some of you guys,
But there ain’t no monkey in me
Here is a motley selection of other verses from various sources:
The June bug comes in the month of June
The lightning bug comes in May
The bed bug comes at any old time
But he ain’t a-going to stay
Sometimes the maybug (cockchafer beetle) is named instead of the lightning bug (firefly, glow worm). Both bugs are beetles, as are June bugs, in case you were wondering. Given current concerns about the possible spread of the Cimex bed bug and the difficulties of dealing with an infestation, it would be interesting to know what measures the singer was planning to use!
Mosquitos they fly high
Mosquitos they fly low
If that old skeeter lands on me
He ain’t gonna fly no more
A peanut sat on a railroad track
Its heart was all a-flutter
Along there came a railroad train
Toot toot! Peanut butter…
A bum sat by a sewer
And by that sewer he died
And at the coroner’s inquest
They called it ‘sewer side’
Now the big bugs have little bugs
Upon their backs to bite ’em
And little bugs have smaller bugs
And so ad infinitum
You may recognize this as a variation of de Morgan’s adaptation of a verse by Jonathan Swift that originally referred to fleas. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fleas]
The Knocker Up
“The Knocker Up” is probably older and is certainly more ‘English’ – in the US, “being knocked up” has a meaning that has nothing to do with the story behind this song, as related by David Niven. He claimed (if I remember correctly) in The Moon’s A Balloon to have fallen foul of it on a Transatlantic liner, when he offered to ‘knock up’ a female fellow passenger. It’s been suggested by some of his contemporaries, however, that he was not averse to exaggerating for comic effect or even claiming that anecdotes concerning other people were about him, so who knows?
This particular song, however, refers more sedately if somewhat obliquely to the times when an alarm clock would have been a luxury item. A knocker up would walk through the streets in the early morning tapping on workers’ bedroom windows with a stick, to ensure that they made it to the mill or the pit on time for their day’s work. There are a number of serious, modern-ish songs that refer to this occupation, such as Mike Canavan’s “The Knocker Up Man” and Ted Edwards’ “Coal Hole Cavalry”. Both those songs are mentioned in a Mudcat thread at https://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=79341. (I note from that thread that Niven was not the only person to have been embarrassed by his ignorance of the American idiom.)
While I was writing this piece, I couldn’t help wondering how the knocker up got up in time to perform his task, and that Mudcat thread includes a snippet that poses the same question. The Lancashire Mining Museum quotes a tongue-twister from that period that gives an answer, and the article also has plenty of other relevant information and illustrations.
We had a knocker-up, and our knocker-up had a knocker-up
And our knocker-up’s knocker-up didn’t knock our knocker up, up
So our knocker-up didn’t knock us up ‘Cos he’s not up.
The song my grandmother remembered described a less formal arrangement, with deliberate comic effect.
A pal of mine once said to me
“Will you wake me up at half past three?”
So I went by at half past one,
Tapped at the window and said, “Oh, John,
I’ve just come round to tell you,
Just come round to tell you,
Just come round to tell you
You’ve two more hours to sleep.”
The tune is very well known: variations have been used for sea songs, children’s songs, rugby songs and much else under various titles such as ‘Early In The Morning’. However, in folk clubs – the ones I’ve visited, anyway – it is probably best known as the song ‘William Brown’ or ‘Keep That Wheel A-Turning’, first published by the Independent Labour Party in 1927 with words by Arthur Hagg, with additional verses by Bill Keable. According to the version I first heard, William turned out so much product that the market slumped, the price fell, and William was sacked. A similar version can be found on Mudcat: https://mudcat.org/@displaysong.cfm?SongID=3362. (That thread also includes a version of the same song that my Grandmother knew, along with some other fragments.)
The verses by Bill Keable tell us that the company became so profitable that it was sold to another company, and again, William was sacked. https://oursubversivevoice.com/song/12320/
*Probably in an interview in English Dance and Song. Oddly enough, I think I may have seen a version of There Ain’t No Bugs On Me in another edition of ED&S, but I haven’t seen those magazines in several decades.
**Aerophones comprise a wide-ranging group of instruments (and actually includes the harmonica), but I suspect that my grandmother played either a piano accordion, button accordion, or melodeon. Or possibly more than one. Sadly, it’s more than 50 years too late to ask her. There’s also a range of digital wind instruments marketed by Roland under the name Aerophone, but I don’t know what she would have made of those. Perhaps she’d have loved them: I quite fancy a closer look at one, but it’s a long time since I played anything woodwind…
*** As it happens, I knew Mike Canavan when I lived in Manchester for a while in the 1970s. He was, as I recall, a fine songwriter, but apart from his Knocker Up Man. I (mis)remember with some affection a song of his including a terse verse about the River Irk, which empties unobtrusively into the Irwell. Despite the verse’s brevity, there’s a line I can’t remember, but the last one was to the effect of ‘your leaping, bounding waters are in places six feet wide’. He did release an album called Some Songs on the Smile label that included Knocker Up Man, but I don’t think the Irk song was on it.
In fact, I learn from Sam Simmons that Charles Menteith recalls the river song as being about the Douglas, not the Irk. Apparently the Douglas (or Asland or Astland) also flows through Manchester, but I wasn’t familiar with it, and I don’t remember the rest of the song at all. I’m not inclined to argue with someone who actually sang the song, so I suspect that it was both rivers got a mention at some point. Still, the Douglas was apparently navigable by small craft at one time, which suggests that it may have been wider than six feet, at least in places!
[I can’t believe I forgot to credit this, but the photograph was taken by Rita Ozolins in the early 90s. And yes, it’s me with my daughter Kate, and it was in the Lake District. I don’t usually write autobiographical songs, but this is closer than most.]
Hilltop Snapshots
Backup
In this photograph we’re walking / over Devon’s tors
Every vista made us think / we might just manage one hill more
But the sun was sinking fast / And it was time for food and beer
Happily / It was all downhill from there
In another shot I’m walking / With the baby on my back
Though I swore she’d gained an ounce or two / With every yard of Lakeland track
But the view was worth the trek / As she chuckled in my ear
And anyway / It was all downhill from there
Up here on this Cornish hill / I could almost touch the sun
As it rose from the sea / A fresh-rinsed day had just begun
The view was worth the climb / And home was still quite near
And anyway / It was all downhill from here
Here’s another golden sky / The sunset paints behind the hill
Today the path’s too steep to walk / I wonder when I ever will?
With the clarity of hindsight / I can see my last few years
The trouble is / It’s all downhill from here!
I was always slightly annoyed by the first recording of this because the Nashville-strung guitar sounded a bit distorted. This isn’t perfect either, but the guitars aren’t too bad.
One acoustic guitar, one Nashville-strung acoustic, one vocal.
The Abbey watches my train crawling Southwards
Thoughts of Cadfael kneeling in his cell
All along the Marches line, myth and history
Prose and rhyme
But these are tales I won’t be here to tell
The hill is crouching like a cat at play
Its beacon flashing red across the plain
Once we were all friends around the Wrekin
But some will never pass this way again
Lawley and Caradoc fill my window
Facing down the Long Mynd, lost in rain
But I’m weighed down with the creaks and groans
Of all the years I’ve known
And I don’t think I’ll walk these hills again
Stokesay dreams its humble glories
Stories that will never come again
Across the Shropshire hills
The rain is blowing still
But the Marcher Lords won’t ride this way again
The royal ghosts of Catherine and Arthur
May walk the paths of Whitcliffe now and then
Housman’s ashes grace
The Cathedral of the Marches
He will not walk Ludlow’s streets again
The hill is crouching like a cat at play
Its beacon flashing red across the plain
Once we were all friends around the Wrekin
But some will never pass this way again
And I may never pass this way again
‘The Abbey’ is actually Shrewsbury’s Abbey Church: not much else of the Abbey survived the Dissolution and Telford’s roadbuilding in 1836. Cadfael is the fictional monk/detective whose home was the Abbey around 1135-45, according to the novels by ‘Ellis Peters’ (Edith Pargeter).
The Welsh Marches Line runs from Newport (the one in Gwent) to Shrewsbury. Or, arguably, up as far as Crewe, since it follows the March of Wales from which it takes its name, the buffer zone between the Welsh principalities and the English monarchy which extended well into present-day Cheshire.
‘The hill’ is the Wrekin, which, though at a little over 400 metres high is smaller than many of the other Shropshire Hills, is isolated enough from the others to dominate the Shropshire Plain. The beacon is at the top of the Wrekin Transmitting Station mast, though a beacon was first erected there during WWII. The Shropshire toast ‘All friends around the Wrekin’ seems to have been recorded first in the dedication of George Farquar’s 1706 play ‘The Recruiting Officer’, set in Shrewsbury.
‘Lawley’ refers to the hill rather than the township in Telford. The Lawley and Caer Caradoc do indeed dominate the landscape on the East side of the Stretton Gap coming towards Church Stretton from the North via the Marches Line or the A49, while the Long Mynd (‘Long Mountain’) pretty much owns the Western side of the Gap.
Stokesay Castle, near Craven Arms, is technically a fortified manor house rather than a true castle. It was built in the late 13th century by the wool merchant Laurence of Ludlow, and has been extensively restored in recent years by English Heritage, who suggest that the lightness of its fortification might actually have been intentional, to avoid presenting any threat to the established Marcher Lords.
Prince Arthur, elder brother of Henry VIII, was sent with his bride Catherine of Aragon to Ludlow administer the Council of Wales and the Marches, and died there after only a few months. Catherine went on to marry and be divorced by Henry VIII, and died about 30 years later at Kimbolton Castle. Catherine is reputed to haunt both Kimbolton and Ludlow Castle lodge, so it’s unlikely that she also haunts Whitcliffe, the other side of the Teme from Ludlow Castle. (As far as I know, no-one is claimed to haunt Whitcliffe. Poetic licence…) The town itself does have more than its share of ghosts, though.
For some time it has puzzled me that in ‘A Ballad for Catherine of Aragon’, Charles Causley refers to her as “…a Queen of 24…” until I realized he was probably referring not to her age, but to the length of time (June 1509 until May 1533) that she was acknowledged to be Queen of England.
The ashes of A.E. Housman are indeed buried in the grounds of St. Laurence’s church, Ludlow, which is not in fact a cathedral, but is often referred to as ‘the Cathedral of the Marches’. It is indeed a church with many fine features (I have about a zillion photographs of its misericords) and its tower is visible from a considerable distance (and plays a major part in Housman’s poem ‘The Recruit’).
The song was actually mostly written on a train between Shrewsbury and Newport at a time when I was frequently commuting between Shropshire and Cornwall to visit my frail 94-year-old mother, who died a few months after, so it has particular resonance for me. It originally included a couple of extra verses about Hereford and the Vale of Usk, but after the ‘Wrekin’ chorus forced its way into the song, I decided to restrict it to the Shropshire-related verses. Maybe they’ll turn up sometime as another song.
Wheal Alice Music 